by Bruce P. Grether
Much as I have always loved C.S.
Lewis, Tolkien, Herbert and other great world-builders of imaginative fiction,
I’ve never wanted to write a book that resembles anything I’ve read. Thus the
worlds I’ve created contain no Great Lion, no Elves, dragons or wizards, and no
giant sandworms.
I’m not bragging, probably I’m just
a stubborn individualist this way. Though I’ve seen speculation that readers of
such books tend to two basic categories, wanting originality, or wanting the
same basic thing over and over again thinly disguised, I’m not certain it’s so
simple as either exploring something that seems new, or imitation.
Perhaps this all has more to do
with the early influences upon writers, as well as readers.
Recently I’ve considered what
stimulated my own creative imagination early on. Though I was not actually
reading much fiction on my own yet at age five, I know that my mother was
actively reading to me and my siblings almost every night, a wide variety of
fiction: Mark Twain, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and various other classic children’s
books.
That same year, I experienced a
remarkable scope of actual experiences, only bits and pieces of which I clearly
remember. We traveled westward from Thailand to the USA, and I saw the Great
Sphinx, played at the foot of the Great Pyramid, saw mummies in the Cairo
museum; in the Coliseum in Rome, I pretended a marble chunk was a piano; we saw
the Crown Jewels in London; at Lincoln’s tomb in Illinois I was photographed
pretending to smoke my toy peace pipe and wearing a feather bonnet. In Denver, I vividly
recall that we saw Disney’s brand new film, SLEEPING BEAUTY.
During my sixth through my eighth
year back in Thailand, my first three years of elementary school exposed me to
an immense range of imaginative fiction, from fairytales, to detective stories,
to Narnia, and many others. I’ve been both an avid reader and a writer ever
since. Some of my first few completed novels were somewhat derivative, and we
can certainly learn our art and craft by imitation. In my early teens, however,
I consciously realized that I was not interested in creating worlds that much
resembled any I’ve read.
Something different than conscious
creation set my writings in motion, a form of inspiration, perhaps from the unconscious
mind. The worlds I’ve fully explored by writing full-length novels and series
of novels set there have all opened to me without exception through a vivid
dream. Most dreams that I recall are not so detailed or clear, but the ones I
refer to each created a doorway in my mind that I could always pass through
again.
That’s how it works for me!
